| The existential there-sentence has an unusual form and grammatical properties, such as an expletive subject, agreement with the post-verbal noun phrase, definiteness effects and the predicate restriction. These properties are argued to stem from the sentence's logical form, which diverges from function-argument structure. The hypothesis pursued here is that in a there-sentence, feature-placing, a term originally coined by Strawson (1959), not predication, is the mechanism that forms a truth-bearing unit. Feature-placing is formalized as the satisfying of a characteristic function at a location. The construction's notable properties are shown to stem from its feature-placing form. Notably, its locative content, expletive subject, the definiteness effects and the predicate restriction all receive a holistic explanation on the feature-placing account. The logical form and truth conditions of the feature-placing sentence, which include neither existential quantification nor an existential predicate, are non-objectual: They contain no individual or individual variable. Nonetheless, an existential assertion results, and its truth conditions are shown to be an equivalent translation of their standard objectual counterparts. |
